CS 4753 -- Human Factors in Software Development

Home Work 1: Using GUI Builders

Due November 13


In this assignment you will learn how to use a graphical user interface builder tool, namely, the dtbuilder tool under Sun's Solaris and CDE. The objective of the assignment is to build an interface which appears just like (or with some embellishments) the one pictured below.

Recall that to run dtbuilder, type (from inside one of your directories)

% /usr/dt/bin/dtbuilder 
From there, you should just interact with the tool and build up your interface. Part of the challenge of this assignment is the open-ended nature of it. So you need to be resourceful and exploratory to discover how to accomplish all the necessary tasks. (We do have some dtbuilder documentation in the lab.) It is OK to ask others on how to accomplish certain things with the interface, just make sure that the actual work of building the interface is your own.

When you have your interface in its final form, save it to a .bip file somehere in your directories. All you need to turn in is one page telling us where this file resides. IMPORTANT: Make sure that this file is readable by us, so that we can load your interface and check it out. If we can't load your interface, we can't grade you on anything. And that means you get zero.

Feel free to embellish the interface. Just make sure you use the noted controls. Add some color. One big test is to see whether your itnerface responds to resizing the main outer window well. See if you can get that to work.